The consequences are interesting, particularly regarding dual licensing. One of the issues (whether it is a problem or a benefit depends on your point of view) regarding dual licensing is that the original licensor cannot embrace code from an external contributor, even if that code is available under the original license, and distribute it both under the original license and under the other, presumably proprietary, license. This is due to the original work of that external contributor being also covered by copyright, unless that contributor voluntarily and explicitly grants the right to re-license the contribution. This does not happen with patents, since the external contribution does not necessarily include any patented aspects. …

01.12.06

The main difference among the free software and open source software concepts are the motivation of the people identifying with each (that is why I tend to use the term FLOSS when I do not want to be specific about either group. From time to time the question of whether some software is open source or rather free software appears. For example, Linus said that the Linux kernel:

… has never been an FSF project, and in fact has never even been a “Free Software” project.

Whether the kernel is or is not a Free Software project is arguable, because it depends on how the developers feel about it or what their intentions are. But what can we say about the set of software grouped under the label of “Free Software” and the set of software gropued under the label of “Open Source Software”? This is far more objective, although not absolutely objective. …

05.10.06

OpenBusiness runs a very interesting inteview with Last.FM on their project, website or service, whatever you may call it. This is an interesting iniciative that offers what we could call an “open service”, although we still do not have a sound definition for what an open service should entail, but both Tim O’Reilly and Tim Bray have made interesting points. This is further followed by Anthony Coates by concluding:

Data matters. It shouldn’t be an afterthought. It will outlive your applications.

The differences of FLOSS, Open Standards and Open Services and Open Infrastructure are very interesting, since each of these has its particularities. You would not want to make an open standard free for everyone to change on their own will as many times as they want, since one of the value of standars is that software that implements it can interoperate, so it should be chasing a moving target. On the other hand, anyone should be able to participate in the definition of a standard, but without having the design by committee effect of creating a bloated and far from ideal result by including everyone’s opinion. Bob Sutor has given it a thought, as has Bruce Perens who even has come up with a proposed definition of the open standards concept on which I have commented previously in spanish.

Similar differences apply to both Open Services and Open Infrastructure. On the latter, I personally think that FON is something close to the model of how this concept should be like, specifically when considering the Linus way of using it. The basis here is: I give you mine so you let me use yours. This has been the basis of several widely used iniciatives, ranging from subscription libraries to public goods and infrastructure managed by governments. So why should we not apply these principles to our IT infrastructures, with the benefit that this does not depend on a government making decisions for all of a country’s citizens, and not being bound to any geographic region? This topic have been addressed by Jon Udell and Tim O’Reilly, and we can look at projects like BOINC that take a different path than FON.
To conclude: FLOSS, Open Standards, Open Services and Open Infrastructure do have some relations but also meaningful differences. Their use and development in the future is something to keep an eye (and actively work) on.

Update: there is an interesting discussion about what a specific kind “open service” (they talk about web 2.0 sites that enable people to share content) should look like, triggered by Lessig’s post “The Ethics of Web 2.0” and a nice followup by Tim O’Reilly “Real Sharing vs. Fake Sharing“.

10.08.06

Drivers for Graphic Cards has been a pain in the ass for open source communities. Since the market is still evolving very fast, the vendors are reluctant to give any information to their competitors. The problem is that they consider open source drivers to be one way of giving away information. I will not comment on that one right here, just mention it as a fact: vendors have been very reluctant to deliver open source drivers or even information to others who would be able to create those drivers. Hence, the end-user in most cases has the choice of using a less-featurefull, lower-performance but open source driver or to use a binary-only driver provided by the vendor.

The open source driver is generally of lower performance because of the lack of information, making it difficult for the programmers to make use of the hardware capabilities. They need to go through a long and difficult process of reverse engineering in order to guess the way the hardware works. …

07.08.06

The 2006 OSS Watch Survey is available (you may also take a look at the executive summary). This survey studies the usage of Open Source Software (FLOSS) in Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) institutions in the UK. The previous survey was from 2003 and some improvements have been made. This time, 23 institutions answered the questions.

The study not only looks at the usage but also into the reasons behind it, contribution to the OSS community and others. Contrary to the 2003 version, this time the vendor lock-in was said to be an issue among the institutions. The study is definitively worth a look.
One of the results states that 56% of the FE institutions use Moodle. This is consistent with the feeling you get about the issue here in Chile, but I would not be surprised that the usage percentage would be higher here (mostly because of the lack of legacy systems and because licensing costs tend to have a greater impact).

28.07.06

So, the second draft of the GPLv3 is out. Changes include a rephrasing of the anti-DRM aspects of the code. In fact, the wording DRM is not there anymore. As Richard Stallman has made it clear in his presentation at barcelona, the purpose of these clauses is to avoid the “tivoisation” of programs. That is, even if the source code of the GPL software is available, you cannot change some bit and trust it to be installed on the same hardware it was distributed with, and work. This is because you need a special key to do so, or the hardware will refuse to run the modified code.

If we assume as a fact that software enforcing DRM will exist in the future, I would rather like to have the code available, and being able to reproduce the compilation exactly as to generate the same binary that has been signed as “trusted”. That way, at least I would have enough information to choose whether I could trust the system enough or not, and this would set abuses on the part of publishers to a minimum. This does not mean that the code should be under the GPL, though. So up to this point there is really no problem.

There are some issues, though, where I’m not so sure about. One phrase in particular states: